Why South Korea brought Philly’s police tech team to Seoul

Put Google, Microsoft, Esri and the City of Philadelphia‘s public safety technology team in the same room.

They were some of the presenters at December’s Safer Korea conference, which the South Korean government organized as a way to learn more about different ways to use technology to keep its citizens safe.

Grant Ervin and Paul Woodruff at South Korea’s KINTEX convention center.

The South Korean government invited Grant Ervin, who heads Public Safety GIS for the city, and city GIS developer Paul Woodruff to Ilsanseo-gu, a city northwest of capital city Seoul, to speak about a data system they developed for Philadelphia’s public safety offices. Instead of having separate data systems for each public safety office (Police, Fire, Office of Emergency Management), they built a system that would put all of that GIS data in one place. Ervin called it the “biggest public safety GIS in the country.”